My goals

I was going through the podcast today and listening to the last two or three podcasts and it mentioned to post our goals usually anything that's is in writing is usually accomplished so I wanted to post my goals to everyone and be held accountable.
My initial goal is to mail out over 1000 mailers for this quarter. So that's over 333 mailers a month. I want them to be hand written and addressed so this is going to require me to allocate time daily to do this. Here it goes!

If you're getting into direct mail marketing, you way want to connect with @Sharon Vornholt . She's written a number of articles about this topic on the BP blog and has been successful with direct mail marketing for quite some time.

You don't need to torture yourself by hand writing your letters. You simply cannot build a sustainable business by doing that. I personally use white, computer generated letters. All of the letters are personalized with the name of the person and the property address. Folks that use yellow letters use a company to generate those letters; they don't hand write them if they are trying to build a real business.

In my probate mailings, I have a girl that will stuff and hand address them for $11 a hundred.

The second problem is that you need a higher volume of letters. 300 is not very many. If you get a 1-3% return (calls) on your direct mail, that is 3-9 calls from your mailing on average. Even a 5% return will only be 15 calls.

In general you will need to talk to about 20 sellers to get one deal. Your volume of mail is simply not high enough especially for the work you are doing.

Kim Book - Putting your goals in writing is a great start. Good for you.

I also believe accountability is useful, too. However, posting your intent to write X letters may very well just become one of the over 800,000 posts now on BP. May I offer a few suggestions:

Understand the different between goals and objective. They are not the same. Your goals ought to be numerical and your objectives specific to an action. I'll bet your objective is to get the phone to ring with qualified, defined prospects and your real goal is to buy one property by a date certain.

Write down on paper your goal(s) and objectives where you will see it/them everyday. Consider putting a picture an example property on that paper so that you visualize it.

I think it's also very helpful to understand the difference between strategy and tactics. Strategy is the bigger plan as to how you plan to achieve a certain objective and an ultimate goal; tactics are the methods and techniques that you'll employ after you've started. For example, your strategy is to market directly to property owners but your tactics are the tools and skills that you'll employ when talking to these people when they (hopefully) call you on the phone.

Clarity is essential. I encourage you and anyone reading this to make an ongoing, lifelong study of goal setting and visualization. Besides Napoleon Hill's classic, Think and Grow Rich, you may find many more resources at sites like Nightingale Conant.

@Rick H. thank you so much for that information. It is not new to me but it is definately a reminder of what I am doing wrong. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you. I am totally going to revamp my system.

@Sharon Vornholt I did not hand write all my letters. I wrote them and then used my computer to print them out. I am on a true budget and I have to spend what I can on my marketing so I have budgeted for 300 Stamps per month and I will continue to rotate my list to get action. We have gotten some calls mostly from craigslist. I am also a broker with a brokerage firm so trying a lot of this on my own is so new to me. I am trying to downsize everything and focus just on me as my company. A lot of overhead kills companies. But thank you so much for your input. If you have other marketing ideas that I can imploy, please let me know. I am eager to learn and I want to really focus on this aspect with time.

If you can only do 300 letters every month, then that is what you should do. Work with the budget you have and just do it every month. The best thing you can do is to invest in a great big wall calendar, write down your marketing plan and implement it.

@Sharon Vornholt @Mark Ferguson @Rick H. Guys, i had to let you all know, we mailed out over 200 letters on Monday of this week and I have had 12 phone calls so far, 5 of which we are doing the research on the properties now. One I am going to list it for sale, They are in pre-foreclosure (im a Real Estate Broker as well) I think for our first mail out and only 3 days into it that is a great responce. Thank you all for your input and I am going to spend this weekend organizing my home office and making it condusive to great results and get some systems into place and rethink all this stuff. I am going to repost all my goals and I would appreciate your further input. Thanks again...

Free eBook from BiggerPockets!

Join BiggerPockets and get The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Real Estate Investing for FREE - read by more than 100,000 people - AND get exclusive real estate investing tips, tricks and techniques delivered straight to your inbox twice weekly!